La Petite Mort
by TalulaJones
Summary: Bonnie is a vampire and Damon is a hunter.
1. The Little Death

Stefan had brought her home on a Thursday.

A fortnight before All Hallows Eve, and only three days, after Stefan's discharge from the Mystic Fall's intensive care unit, where his brother had been jabbed, prodded and monitored, physically and mentally for seven days. And exactly one month prior to him, tricking her, injecting her full of vervain and chaining her in the dank basement.

That's where she is right now. Gnawing for their deaths, he suspects.

Damon taps his fingers on the crystal glass, the amber liquid rippling with each beat; he licks his thumb and slides the wetness at the corner of a dry page. He's in his father's old office, feet up on the oak desk, drink in hand while reading over his father's leather-bound journals.

Apparently Giuseppe had been tracking her over the span of 20 years, indirectly for most of the pursuit Damon figures because he can't remember his father's fist being far from his temple for more than a week. Her intimate day-to-day and whereabouts are documented in faint scribble-scratch, evidence of her existence sent to him through other hunters Damon supposes, a world-wide web of men and women with the same birthright as himself.

He is two stories above the basement floor, so he can't hear her, but as he observes dust, illuminated and floating over the floor lamps, like apparitions hovering in the corners of his father's book-lined office, he concentrates solely on the soft tap of his finger pads on the glass of bourbon, and envisions her. Expensive black riding boots scuffling over the dirty cement from her seated position, dark curls shrouding her apple cheeks, heart-shaped face, tumbling over ragdoll limbs, the coiled ends stiff with dried blood. Her rich caramel skinned arms, smudged with earth and grime, cuffed in metal, and suspended over her head in chain links, her green eyes are surely closed, he can just see them, shut tight, along with her cupids-bow mouth as she plots and waits for him to come to her.

He can't hear her, but he _can_ hear Stefan, who is locked away in his own bedroom, his door heavily padlocked on the outside. His younger sibling is finally awake from being drugged and carried away so as to not to intervene in his premeditated capture of the vampire.

Stefan is hammering on the wood, yelling, '_Goddamn you Damon.'_

Damon rolls his eyes, leisurely removing his feet from the desk, sipping his drink as he saunters down the hall. His brother has been mostly asleep for the ten hours he's been trapped in his room and Damon is considering letting him out, and driving him over to his ex-girlfriend's house to dry out and cool off from any notions of trying to retaliate, and he stands on the other side of Stefan's door and pulls at the lock, ready to free him but Stefan's muffled roars reverberates through the wood, _'Let her out, Damon, let her out,'_ and Damon drops the lock, shaking his head.

That was his brother; the boy could have all the cards stacked against him, and just when he could save his self with an Ace, he trades it to help another.

"No can do, brother" he snorts, staring down the hallway and the many gilded portraits of Salvatores, "Don't forget who you are," he says sternly, leaving the door and the shouts of his brother.

"_She's not like the others."_

"Fucking sap," he mumbles to himself, quick stepping down the red carpet covered staircase, thinking that his brother _**would**_ fall in love with a vampire.

And how would he know if she is unlike the other bloodsuckers; he has never hunted, he had just started training on how to subdue their kind when their old man was murdered. He had no personal reference of what her kind was capable of, other than war stories from their drunken father and ancient textbooks, until her. She is the first vampire his baby bro has ever encountered, the first gorgeous nightmare, which makes Damon think Stefan's attachment to the vamp is even sappier.

The basement door creaks, and Damon stands at the top of the rickety stairwell, inhaling the damp mildewed air, his skin prickling as his eyes dilate from the darkness and the silence below and the possibility she has freed herself.

Squaring his shoulders, he makes a face for even thinking she could lift her head from all the vervain, let alone rip off her chains.

He quickly flips a light switch and a bulb buzzes, and he walks down the stairs and bangs on the metal, rattling her cage, "Wake up, Bon-Bon," he spouts nicknames for her at the top of his head. "How's my petite mort," he cruelly jokes, and glances through the grate, narrowing his eyes to detect the slightest movement, and frowns at her crumpled form.

His heartbeat quickens as he ruminates over the likelihood of a vampire dying from the amount of poison he pumped into her, and he tightens his jaw, and kicks the door for her attention, but she remains slumped, and he says her name, "Bonnie?" alarmed and firm.

Her name echoes in his mind, over the past thirty-one days of him saying her name thirty-one different ways, and the lack of shock in her green eyes when he jabbed the needle into her side, and how she held on to his shoulders and leaned into his arms as if she expected it.

Damon turns the key and swings open the prison door.

And Damon has to agree with his brother that Bonnie Bennett is unlike the others, but not because of some bullshit like being harmless or compassionate, but because she's alive.

He has slain every single vampire he has come in contact with in the ten years he's earned the honor of his familial vocation. And the fact that he hasn't driven a stake through her un-beating heart has kept Damon up pacing the floors at night.

Damon crouches to the ground, mere feet from the vampire, and angles his head down to peer at her face but it's hidden behind her dark hair. He extends his arm, lifting a curtain of tendrils from her face, and her lashes flutter, but they do not open. She's broken. And He furrows his brow, cupping her cold cheek and he opens his mouth to utter a mess of words, and her eyes flash open, vibrant green irises startling him, and she no longer looks broken but ethereal, and his brain registers that her wrists aren't bound by metal cuffs anymore, and in the breath it takes his face to show fear, she has her canines embedded so deep into his neck that he is rendered speechless from the scraping of her teeth on his vocal cords.

Slurping and growling, she suckles his blood, tugging at his veins, moaning, and when she unclasps her mouth from his neck there is a gelatinous popping sound and his head colliding to the floor.

She appears on her feet, her steps light and quick, like a feline, and he watches her from his supine position, the back of his head flat on the concrete, watching her straddle him and finally align her body on top of his. She caresses his cheek with the back of her freshly warmed hand, stretching her wide mouth into a bloody smile, "Do you see your mother, Damon," she asks him, pointing for him to look over at the far right corner of the cell, and she looks down at him and up again, "Or your father, "she questions with a raised brow," Humans speak of seeing their ancestors when they are dying."

His heart beat slows into a dirge, and his breaths are quick and shallow.

"And make no mistake, my beautiful hunter, you are dying, "she coos, her tepid hand stroking his brow. She kisses his forehead, leaving a bloody imprint of her full lips, and whispers into his ear, "You should have killed me, Damon."

And as he lay dying, collapsed in her arms, he wished he had.

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Chapter 2 coming soon….


	2. Pleasure Is All Mine

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He doesn't see any dead family.

No mother.

No father.

There are also, no luminescent beatific beings, swathing him in their feathery wings to light-speed his soul to Heaven.

Fragments of Sunday-school lessons on a biblical after-life flood his wavering consciousness: he would either go to where they sing, 'Holy, Holy' day and night, or he'd go to the lake of fire where he would roast, imagining his human carcass on a spit.

Where was the bright light? The montage of his life in reverse? The blaring trumpets?

Had it really, all been bullshit?

Mrs. Kowalski, his Sunday-school teacher, wasn't gonna be happy about this.

If he wasn't an inch away from his life, he would gloat. There actually wasn't going to be a grand parting of the sky, where a gray-bearded God would tell him what it all was for after dredging through an existence of suffering and pain. He was right all along telling the other kids in his class that heaven didn't exist, but as his life drains on the filthy cell floor, he doesn't feel victorious.

Even as a staunch atheist, he had secretly hoped to be proven wrong. That in his twenty-eight years of thumbing his nose at religion, in his cynical heart he really yearned to me made to believe. Would it have been too cliché for a revelation to have been on his death bed?

Not that he would have been stoked about having to be wear a white robe and made to sing in a chorus for all eternity, fuck that, what he wants is the _'other place'_.

The 'other place' has haunted him since he learned what were dreams made of; it was in this astral plane, he figured he would crash land upon his death, where he would start over, and wander, and again, search for meaning like every other man, but eventually she would come; and the hunger would cease, the quest forgotten in her eyes.

His sight deceives him now, and a vision does manifest, cloudy and dream-like, but it isn't one of his ancestors; it's her. And she's naked, caramel limbs stretched across a disheveled canopy bed, and she is smiling, 'Damon', she moans his name, rubbing her hand over her neck, and he sees the emerald ring at her throat.

And before he inhales his last breath, and closes his eyes; his jaw is crushed open, and his mouth fills with the thick taste of rust and salt, that metallic taste; the taste of blood.

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When Damon had arrived to the hospital, he had come crawling outta some bar, reeking of bourbon, and squinting his blood-shot eyes into the small, rectangular window of Stefan's room, eyeing his brother bandaged in white and accompanied by beeping machines that were orchestrating a symphony from his heartbeat. A police officer had appeared, or maybe he was already there when Damon had showed up, but he had looked at Damon up and down, disapproving, and informed him, right outside his younger brother's hospital room, that Stefan was a good kid, and it was a shame what had happened to their father, remembering to mumble a sympathetic word about their also dead mother, and that he thought all that death might have done something screwy to Stefan. He said that Stefan had left a house party under the influence and had wrapped their recently deceased Father's classic Porsche around a tree.

The police officer stepped back for a doctor, who held his clipboard, listing off all the failing organs and broken bones his brother suffered from, and Damon nodded slowly, his jaw tight, while passersbys assumed he was overwrought with anger because he's a man, and men don't know how to express grief.

But he had been genuinely angry.

He had loved that car.

"_Will he live?"_

The doctor told him in medical speak that he wasn't certain, and advised him he could go into the room to check on his brother if he wanted when the nurse went in to check his vitals.

Damon rambled aimlessly in the halls, purchased coffee from a machine, grabbed an orange plastic chair from the waiting area and dragged it across the linoleum floors, placing it by Stefan's door. He rubbed his hands over his face, drinking his fifty cent cup of coffee from a paper cup, trying to look sober as hospital staff zipped by. And in the ten minutes he had held vigil outside Stefan's room, he rested his forehead in his palms, and passed out.

A hand had pushed his shoulder; it was Elena, Stefan's weepy-eyed girlfriend, who he had only met a couple days ago at his father's funeral.

"Have you seen him, yet?" She asked, standing over him, her arms folded under her breast.

He told her he didn't want to, muttering about not wanting to see him like that and that he'd be out in no time. His brother was a Salvatore, after all.

She tugged at his wrist, grasping his hand like they were friends, and he didn't think too much about the awkward embrace as he groggily followed her into the room with the beeping monitors and the sterile white sheets.

He stared down at his brother's black and blue face.

And he looked up at Elena, she had intertwined her fingers into his brother's and tears silently seeped from the slits of her eyes.

"He can hear us," She said, like she had expected Damon to tell his brother he loved him, or encourage him to hang in there, something mushy, something not like Damon.

What could he have said?

That he hadn't been the best brother. That most of the time, he ignored the fact he even had a brother. Not out of anything Stefan had done, but because Damon was a loner, and he learned at a very young-age that it was best to remain on the outside, not too attached, because it was the attachments that killed you.

But as the monitors beeped, he realized his previous thoughts of taking off from Mystic Falls once his brother and he settled their family estate, had went flying out the window.

He had glanced over at Elena's doe-eyes, visibly relenting as he sighed, "So," he smirked, "You're the love of my brother's life? 

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"Hot date?" Damon had asked Stefan, who tossed a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt on to his bed.

Stefan hid a coy smile and shrugged, "Not sure you can call it a date; I just met her today at school."

It was the end of the day and Damon was doing his evening attempt at a heart to heart since Stefan's car crash before he took off to find a bar and a woman. He filled up Stefan's doorway, leaning on the frame with his arms folded, looking out Stefan's bedroom windows at the last of the October sun-light, and the golden-orange leaves speckled with remnants of green here and there on the trees.

Damon scrunched his face, "Wait a minute?" He pressed out his hands to demonstrate his confusion, "You're not going out with Elena? This is a new chick?"

"That's why you can't call it a date, she's new to Mystic Falls and doesn't have any friends, yet. I volunteered to show her around tonight," Stefan said defensively, throwing a towel over his shoulder to escape their conversation for a shower.

In the days after Stefan's stint in the hospital, Damon had stuck around, and it had been difficult for them both, him being there, after been gone for ten years. They were strangers; they didn't really know anything about the other because Damon had ditched their home when Stefan was still a kid, and he never came to visit, never phoned, and never wrote. His only connection to his family was his work. He honored his family by doing what he did best; he hunted.

But Damon wanted to try this whole brother thing, see if he could get it right.

Damon laughed, "I'm not judging you brother; I keep them in rotation," He boasted and suggested he trade the blue button down for the green one and left Stefan to prepare himself for his non-date.

He picked up his car-keys from the hall console table, thinking his brother was making a huge mistake with Elena, and he flung the door open, all set to find some trouble for the evening, when he was struck-dumb by the young woman standing on the 'welcome' mat.

"Good evening," She smiled, her voice like a soft, clear bell, "Is Stefan home," She said, sounding like she had been practicing on what to say if a parent had answered the door.

She looked like a present. Gift-wrapped in a black dress, the bodice was tight and crushing her breasts, the short skirt was fitted at her waist, flared in flouncy pleats and showed off her toned legs. She had worn blush pink ballet flats, and she reminded Damon of a porcelain doll, like those tiny ballerinas that spin on their toes in little girls music boxes.

He remembered how to use his words and smiled back, "Yeah, he's still getting ready," he said, staring at her eyes. He had never seen that shade of green in his life before, but strangely he felt he had, that they were familiar.

She brushed a glossy black curl from her shoulder and offered another crooked smile, "May I come in?" she asked.

And he foolishly invited her in, throwing out years of trained practice and hereditary instinct.

He opened the door wider, and she stepped in, lingering in his personal space, "You must be, Damon," she said, grinning and extending her hand.

"I am," he confirmed, shaking her delicate hand and curiously noticing a heavy emerald ring on her left hand. He nodded to the drive-way, "I was just leaving, but he's upstairs if you wanna wait up there," he said tearing his eyes away from drowning in a sea of green.

Her eyes traveled to the staircase, and she turned on the balls of her feet, heading to the stairs, but not before she cast a flirtatious smile at him over her shoulder and said, "It was a pleasure to meet you, Damon."

DBDBDBDBDBDBDB

He wakes with a jerk; he's alive, and gasping dense cool air, writhing his shoulders and clinking his chains against the moldy brick.

Coughing, he sputters, "I'm gonna kill you." His voice is scratchy, and he hacks and hacks after his threat, and weakly yanks at his chains.

She doesn't laugh, she bends her knees to the floor, her angelic face smeared with his blood. "I saved you," she says gently as Damon's confused brow crinkles, "Another night in the dark and you will turn," She informs him, laying out the ritual of how one becomes a vampire and Damon's chains clink violently as he desperately tries to rip them from the brick and strangle her.

He spits, spittle landing on her boots, calls her a bitch, and yells at her that she should have let him die, that he doesn't want to be a blood-sucker, he's a fucking Salvatore for Christ's sake.

"You have my blood now." She confirms, rising to her petite height, "We are one."

Shaking his head, refuting his future, he barks orders at her to free Stefan. He thinks he should be the one to kill him, that there is a symmetry in his brother being the one to deliver his death, something about being his brother's keeper.

She slaps him, hard, his head whipping sideways. "Stop fighting me," She warns, and when the ringing subsides in his ears, and he can see straight again, he notices the corners of her mouth are turned downward, and her eyes are soft, imploring him, that she's sad.

The vampire reaches for his hand and he recoils from her, and she looks hurt and if he were honest it hurts him too.

Sighing heavily, she says," I am not taking away your choice, Damon, if after tonight you do not wish to be a vampire, you can choose to walk out the front door into the sun and end it." She says, and he reflexively thinks there is no question, that she should let him go right now so he can go lay on the lawn, but those green eyes of hers are peering into his, and his feelings muddle, black and white shading to gray.

And he remembers why he didn't like attachments. It was the attachments that killed you. And he sighs, and licks his parched lips, wondering about the other place and if it would be there after the sun. "Why would I want to be a vampire?" He asks smugly, knowing there is nothing she can say that will change his mind.

But there are tears, crystalline beads of salty water in her thick lashes when she looks at him, straightening her spine with a strong smile, "Because of Me."


	3. Who Did That To You?

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Damon looked like shit.

Un-shaven and smelling to high-heaven, he rolled the icy beer bottle over his balmy brow, pressing the make-shift compress over the purplish bruise on his right cheek.

The bottle warmed as he rolled it over his swollen eye socket, and with blackened-blood encrusted nails, he rubbed the bottle along the slope of his neck where there was a ghost of two reddened puncture wounds; the bite mark had been a last ditch effort from the vampire he had slain earlier.

Male vampires liked hand to hand combat; the frequent trend amused Damon, he didn't understand why they just didn't bite his head off right at the bat, and after having to box and rumble with the vampire he killed an hour ago, he blamed Hollywood. Too many movies showing vampires not being vampires; he thought it might had given the vamp men complexes.

Women vamps weren't afflicted with this complex; they didn't waste time trying to stroke their egos, they were about getting rid of the pest quickly and efficiently, and they always went for his neck.

He respected that.

Damon knocked back his shot glass of bourbon and guzzled his beer.

"Keep 'em coming," he slurred to the barkeep, whose name he had asked a million times, but could never remember if it was Harry or Frank, and it was peculiar, because Damon was good at memorizing names; he had stored the names of each vampire he had killed and the ones of those who were in line to be killed. He could list them off like some idiot savant, but when it came to humans, his species, he couldn't make their names stick.

Countless dates had ended in tears, valuable paintings slashed and classic car doors keyed because of his inability to match human names with their correct faces, which was why in the seven months he was in New Orleans, he got around on public transportation and kept his need for female affection to a one night minimum.

Harry or Frank, slid another icy beer from the freezer behind the bar and he poured Damon two shots of bourbon, and when Damon protested that he had only asked for one, Harry or Frank said it was on the house.

"Rough night, yeah?" the bar-keep asked in his thick Creole accent. Damon liked how when Creoles spoke to you, you never quite knew if they were telling you or asking you something.

Damon smirked, his purplish bruise rising with the half smile, "All my nights are rough."

The barkeep snorted, and rubbed at his armpits, and then the middle-aged man leaned on the bar and told Damon about a fight he had to break up before he had come into the bar, it was a catfight he said, two sisters fighting when one admitted to sleeping with the others husband.

He told Damon they were regulars, he said it was like watching a soap opera, he knew all their business and he could recall the day he knew the sister with the husband had fucked up, "She told her how good the sex was; made her sister curious, it was her own damn fault," He gossiped, his weary brown-eyes serious as he shook his head.

It was seven in the morning and Damon was sitting in an empty dive bar on the edge of the French quarter, shooting the shit with a hardened bartender, listening to Fats Domino croon, _'Aint that a Shame'_, from the juke-box as they watched the black and white clothed wait staff hustle down the cobbled streets to their jobs at the restaurants on Bourbon.

Another morning regular like Damon came in to the bar, a coiled newspaper in hand. Damon gave the man a courtesy nod and the barkeep slid his feet down to the other end of the bar where the man sat and he filled the man's ears about the catfight.

That's what Damon loved about New Orleans; there he was, looking like death warmed over and no one gave a damn; not that they wouldn't have cared if he was wailing about his bruises and cuts, if he had, then ol' Harry or Frank would have closed up the bar and walked him down to the hospital himself. The not giving damn wasn't from a lack of brotherhood; the people of New Orleans just didn't bother you with the whys' of your bruises and cuts, they didn't turn their nose up at you for loitering in a decaying bar at seven am instead of scrambling off to some 9-5. It was refreshing to Damon after moving from cities like Los Angeles, New York and Miami where there was always the superficial concern over what he did, where he graduated, what he made, and why was he caked in dried blood.

New Orleans kept Damon honest.

Damon wasn't one to be sentimental, but if he had to connect a good feeling to a city, then he would have esteemed New Orleans as his kind of place. But the southern city with all its old-world charm, colorful history, and laissez-faire attitude couldn't be considered a _**favorite**_ for Damon because it was teeming with vampires.

There had been a recent revival of vampire activity in the Big Easy since them fleeing after being flooded out from Katrina. It was rumored they all left because it was hard for them to go underground when their caskets kept coming afloat. That was the joke, Tomas, an old hunter friend of his Father's, had told him when Damon expressed he was traveling there next after visiting with him in Paris.

Damon had laughed with his father' friend, but both men knew that vampires rarely slept in caskets anymore; only the romantic sect troubled with caskets, and those bastards got creative, we're talking gold-leaf etched names on polished glass tops and ivory Italian silk bedding just so they can be comatose for ten or twelve hours with their hands on their chest.

Most of them now had dropped thousands and in some cases millions, on heavily armed and intricate light tight rooms; the latest technology protecting their ancient lives.

Damon reached into his jean pocket, cupping the contents. He blew on the souvenirs of his kill, shaking the teeth like a pair of die and throwing the blood-streaked canines on the weathered wooden bar.

Because, for him, it didn't matter if they were in a fancy casket or an armored room; Damon was vigilant in his duty to eradicate the earth of bloodsuckers.

And the rising star of New Orleans was no exception.

Klaus had been one sick bastard. He was a vampire who got a kick out of killing other vampires. Damon had been a fan, but he had that ever-growing list of vampire names that he would mentally check off once he had their teeth, and unfortunately for Klaus, Damon had woke up the day before with his name scrawled on his brain as next.

Twisted and ancient, Klaus had been a relic from the tenth century, back when Europe was in the depths of its dark ages and illiterate and degenerate punks were made lords and kings while scientists and philosophers were murdered and tortured by the church for heresy, that's where Klaus came from, and to his survival and detriment, he never quite left.

He still thought he was the high lord of the land and held extravagant balls nightly, masquerades and period dances; vampires and humans attended, and neither species ever saw the outside of the ballroom again, well, except for the musicians, he would compel them to forget and come the following night and the following night and so on.

If any of those inebriated party-goers had bothered to glance up at the ceiling, past the shimmering chandeliers, then they would have been curious about the plethora of meat hooks.

Klaus's had a kink he could satiate since he was one of the very old ones; the older they got, the more potent was their compulsion, and with a nightly diet of blood he could compel younger vamps. Klaus would round up the night with the violins playing and tap the mic and ask for everyone to turn their eyes on him, their host, and he would compel them to not move a muscle.

Learning of Klaus's debaucheries from hunters in the cities he had drained, such as: London, Frankfurt and Prague, he knew that the vampire would eventually create a strong hold on the city once he pilfered out the weaker vampires, and use the stronger ones he thought were useful as his cronies.

Being old as dirt, Klaus had an advantage of having a greater stamina than the run of the mill vampire, Damon had to mull over how to take down the bloodsucker without taking too many hits.

Vampires have weaknesses like every other creature on Earth, just theirs happen to be incredibly few as compared to a human.

They could be killed three ways: the sun, stake through the heart, and severing the head.

Vervain and fire severely paralyzed them, but you could leave the holy water with the priest, it only drenched them, and wearing garlic only made you tastier.

Damon had decided Klaus's weakness was chamber music.

After paying off his eyes and ears of the quarter, Damon had been given the name of the flute player that played at Klaus's. Damon had hung around the young middle-eastern man's apartment building until he came home from his second job, he told the man he had a proposition for him and gave the man a tiny vial and advised him to pour a drop specifically into the punchbowls at the start of the evening. When the man acted frightened about the task, and told Damon to get the hell out of his house.

Damon warned the young man if he didn't, he would put a bullet through his head the next morning.

It was daybreak when Damon had approached the home, sizing up the outer perimeter for clues of what was waiting for him inside, and when Damon had entered the ball room, he saw them, the vampires and humans, strung up like floating dancers over the ballroom floor, their blood running down arms and legs, and dripping from fingertips and toes into silver punchbowls littered around the room.

And the Lord Niklaus Mikaelson was on the stage steps, tuxedo soaked red, belligerent from the copious amounts of poisoned blood, he talked to himself, and didn't notice that Damon was there until the hunter had shot him with three syringes of vervain.

There were blows back and forth, the vampire pretending to be John Wayne, but with the vervain in his system, he was wobbly, weak, and in the last draw, he had resorted to his nature and lunged for Damon's throat and was met with a fist tightly wrapped around a stake, thrust deep into the cavity of his chest.

The former lord had blinked rapidly at Damon, like he recognized him and said, "Gavril?"

And Damon had smiled, and said, "Salvatore," and delivered the vampires death.

He had carved out the vamp's heart; the organ, lifeless, and dark red in his white fist.

He tossed the pulp of blood and tissue onto the floor and used the hilt of his gun to knock out Klaus's canines.

With his trophies in his pocket, he had headed to the Bulgarian's apartment, dropped off a cash stuffed envelope in his mailbox, and then ended his day's work with some eye-openers at the dive bar.

Damon waved the barkeep over and settled his tab.

He then walked the three blocks to his efficiency off St. Ann Street, a one room hole with a bare-thread murphy bed, a rust-stained porcelain sink and a cob-webbed closet. If he needed to shower or shit, there was a shared bathroom down the hall.

His room looked like he was on the run. He kept his belongings packed; his life neatly stacked in a leather steamer trunk and an army-green duffle bag. His weapons were not in the same room where he slept, those were hidden a street over, under the floorboards of a little voodoo shop, where the Creole mistress was kind enough to aid him in such things as concealing armaments and concocting poisons to kill vampires.

He whisked a bar of ivory soap over his hands, forearms and elbows, briskly rubbing the blood off, cleaning up a bit so he could lay down, read a bit and catch some sleep before nightfall.

Taking off his shirt and pants, he padded around the worn hard-wood floors in his boxers to cool down. The metal ceiling fan above him made a sad sound with each revolution, like it was just as uncomfortable about the heat as Damon.

He unlocked the trunk and flipped the heavy lid, scouring through the many books and journals. Those tomes were his family; most of the books had belonged to his mother, and the journals he had stolen from his father had belonged to his great grandfather. Wherever he went in the world, the truck came in tow, sometimes he would forget the duffle bag in one city and have to buy a whole new wardrobe in a new town, but the trunk was obsessively protected and always made it wherever Damon rested his head.

There was a single diamond earring on the floor; Damon saw it as he crouched to rummage through the trunk, it had been lost under the bed; a trace of one of the women he had met earlier in the week he thought.

One of the fancier ones he supposed.

Sprawling on the bed, he relaxed with one of his great-grandfathers diaries, while rolling the tiny diamond earring between his fingers, trying to take his mind off the heat.

In the pages of the journal his great grand-father, Piero, had just arrived from Sicily to the United States. He had left Sicily because it had become overrun by the mob and vampires; Damon laughed as he read his great-grandfather's words describing vamps and mobsters actually being one in the same the way they bled the country. Piero had wrote down in his present time to be read much, much later by his great grandson that he had done his best to defend his people from that evil, that he had been successful in killing fifty-six vampires before he realized that the country was infested and could not be saved without an act of God. He also wrote about the subduing method using the cross, and how he was told by his grandfather that it had worked in his time because the vampire had believed in its power, not because of the belief of the hunter. That he was told it was important for the hunter to remember that vampires had once been humans too, human desires and human faith, and it was imperative to remember their humanity, it was what separated the hunter from being the same monster as the vampire. Piero wrote down that possibly in the future this inkling of knowledge would save the humans from the petulance of vampires, until then the only thing they have is the stake.

Damon was lost in his reading when a letter was slipped under the inch gap under his door.

He opened the door quickly to see the plump landlady hobble back down the stairs, and he scrunched his brow at the letter sent to him second day air from Paris. He locked the door, and tore at the envelope and read two short sentences.

"_Your father is dead. Go home, now."_

_-Tomas_

_Author's Note_

So I know this story is AU but I hope you all like it. I am trying to write this story a bit darker than my other stories and I hope that comes across when you read it. This story will have more chapters but I don't foresee it being more than 10. I have already written the ending, so now I just gotta fill in the middle. LOL

Thank you all for reading and commenting, it means the world to me.

And for those who are curious, I will go into depth about Bonnie's backstory, how she and Damon feel about each other, how Stefan plays in all of this. And yes, there will be flashbacks


	4. Bonnie

Author's Note

My apologies for that last chapter if you read it when I first posted it. I had a bunch of plot holes in the chapter and I went back and re-wrote some scenes. I feel horrible for letting you all read that. Hopefully I can redeem myself. On with the show…

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Ruth had delivered forty-three babies in her sixty-two years on Bennett Place; out of the forty-three, eighteen of them had slipped out of their mothers, stillborn and blue, and Ruth believed it was because those children had been born on bad days.

'Life was hard; no sense in making in harder coming here on a day marked for worry', she would say to whoever would listen. And when the mother's wept, she comforted them with her belief that it was a blessing that the Lord was so gracious to take their babies back to Heaven.

She was twelve when she was pulled from the field to learn midwifery from Kizzy, who had done the birthing before Ruth. As her apprentice, a month prior to the mother's labor, Kizzy had taught her how to predict by the stars the date of the birth and if it were to be an auspicious day and at the time of the labor, she was to fetch for clean water, specific herbs, and the presumed father once the baby was born.

Birthing babies was exciting; there was commotion in the quarters and anticipation, and Ruth had felt special when she and Kizzy were depended upon to help bring lives into the world. And it was a feeling of completion, after months of measuring the mother's stomach and mixing roots with boiled water for her nausea and morning sickness, and a sense of satisfaction when the child came on the date they had predicted.

Whenever Ruth examined the stars for the mothers, she always hoped for a favorable sign, even when Kizzy told her not to because the soul had to bear what the soul was meant to bear; Ruth still wished for auspicious occurrences in the stars, for blessed alignments, like Jesus had.

Jesus had been born on an auspicious day.

She couldn't read one word in the bible, but could quote a spatter of broken scriptures, and in Matthew, she would narrate, that there were three wise men who had looked to the sky, and had seen a star that had never been seen before, it was a rising star, and it foretold the birth of the Lord.

Thinking of the many fortunate births she predicted, she reached her gnarled mahogany hand into the fourteen year old girl and she pressed her fingers on the baby's skull, and mourned that this child was not to be born on a good day.

Solemnly, a month before her water broke, Ruth had told the girl that her baby was to come on a Sunday, and Sunday was never a good day to give birth, it was commanded to be a day of rest, even though neither of them had known rest on the Sabbath.

Fearing a seventh day birth; the women held hands and prayed the child would come on a Saturday.

"Bite down, Abby," Ruth ordered, placing a stick of bark in the girl's mouth to stop her from screaming.

Abby bit down on the bark; her warm honey-colored eyes looked worn out and her face was red and sweaty.

The hour for Saturday had long past, and although both women were downright sad about it, the child still had to come.

Ruth inserted her fingers again, and Abby responded by bucking her pelvis from the pain, but Ruth was finally able to twist the child's shoulders and she yelled at the girl to push.

And while Abby wailed for her own mama and Ruth hoped for the lord to take the child as he had done the others, the master and mistress of the plantation sat in the front pew of their church, the husband noting the hours passing by the long-winded sermon and the wife praying her time-worn prayer for a child - Abby gave birth to a baby girl.

"Don't name her, wait for the full moon," Ruth warned, despite the baby hollering to the world she was well and alive.

Following her routine as she was taught many years ago; Ruth cleaned and swaddled the baby; brewed the mother a nodding tea, and left the newborn in the sleeping mother's arms to inform the father.

She gathered her skirts, walked up to the side entrance to the kitchen of the Big House, and told the Bennett's trusted house servant of Abby's delivery and the newest addition to Bennett Place.

The kitchen hushed as Ruth told the servant loudly, without shame, that the child had green eyes.

In his study for the late afternoon, John Bennett, mulled over the fire and brimstone sermon from that morning as he balanced the books for the plantation and wrote checks to his creditors, and when he was given knowledge of the birth, he thanked the family servant and asked that he make sure the chatter in the kitchen stayed in the kitchen.

John hand-rolled a cigarette, the tobacco pungent in his nostrils, and he smoked silently, standing at the floor-length window considering sending one of the servants over to Abby's quarters to ask the name of the girl child.

But he thought better of it, and smiled to himself, remembering a childhood rhyme.

He sang-song quietly in his study, recalling the words of the poem, "But the child who is born on the Sabbath day, is bonny and blithe and good and gay."

And he dipped his pen into the pot of black ink and in fine script wrote into the slave ledger his daughter's name.

_Bonnie Bennett._


	5. Gilbert Place

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It was Friday night and all of Mystic Falls was crammed inside the open-air football stadium to watch the Mystic Falls Timberwolves take down the Nokesville Mustangs.

Damon had had other plans for his evening but his party wouldn't start until after the bartender he was fucking was off the clock.

Alone in the boardinghouse, searching through his father's study for clues of his death, he thought he would do as the Romans do and pass the time at the game and watch his brother make an appearance on the bench since he was under strict doctor orders to take it easy.

Families had filled entire rows, roaring and cheering for the sons of Mystic, waving foam fingers and metallic pom-poms, while children ran amok, daring each other to hop over the railing, and running up and down the stadium stairs, and cliques of teenage boys and girls dawdled at the Concession stands, smiling and flirting at one another in anticipation of someone from each group gaining the courage to spark a conversation.

He scanned the stands for an open seat, and saw up in the nose-bleed section, Stefan's 'new friend', sitting all be her lonesome.

And even though he realized he didn't get her name last night, and had only met her in passing, and that there was plenty of attractive women at the game he could have surely asked if he could sit next to; he made his way up the concrete stairs to the poised young woman with the blood-red ribbon in her hair.

He scrunched his brow appropriately when he was near enough to get her attention, "You're Stefan's friend, right? "

"Bonnie Bennett," she had said, blinking slowly, while he stood there waiting for her to scoot over.

The bubbly smile she had yesterday was gone, amusing the hell out of Damon, and when she didn't make any inclination that he was welcome to watch the game with her, he shrugged and stepped over her lap and settled in close to her.

"Having a hard time making friends?" He asked, leaning back on his elbows and stretching his legs to the empty row in front of them.

She snorted and reached quickly under her hair and undid the red ribbon, and retied it severely, even though it had been perfect, hiding the little bow under the drape of her dark hair.

"If you wanted to be alone, "He started turning his head from left to right to show how far removed she was from the crowds, "Then I can move along. I only came because when I saw you from down there, I felt so damn sorry for you sitting up here all by yourself," He said jokingly, but secretly hoping she didn't tell him to get lost.

He observed a smile creep on her face from his peripheral, and she sighed, "Are you always this candid?"

"It's a part of my charm," He drawled with a smirk.

She glanced back at him, one eyebrow raised, admonishing him, and Damon's immediate thought was that his baby bro had great taste in women.

"And maybe you'd have more friends if you didn't go around using words like candid. Save that for impressing your teachers. You're already intimidating the shit out of these kids by being beautiful but you gotta compound it by being a beautiful nerd too?"

She laughed, and it would become his goal at every meeting with her to try to get that enchanting sound to come out of her mouth.

"How old are you?" He asked because he wanted to make sure if he continued to flirt that it was legal.

"I turned eighteen in August," She said, her interest locked on the football game.

"Where are you from?"

"Everywhere, "she snorted, "I'm a military brat; just name a city and I've probably lived in it." She said, slipping her hand into her leather purse to retrieve a tube of chapstick.

"And your parents picked Mystic Falls?" He asked, his brow scrunched in disapproval.

"My parents are dead, "She said so matter-of-factly that Damon didn't bother with an apology and knew not to pry.

She slid the tip of the tube over her lips, "Sheila Bennett is my great-aunt; she's letting me stay with her to till I finish up my senior year."

"Then it's off to college, toga parties and first lesbian experiences," He quipped, earning another laugh.

"Your brother alluded to you being some sort of a ladies man, but I'm having a hard time understanding how," She said, furrowing the small space between her bright green eyes.

"He talked about me?" Damon asked, honestly surprised, "What else did he say?"

Bonnie narrowed her eyes at him like she was considering him, like she had more to say but was weighing if she should tell him, "That you both are getting re-acquainted with one another."

"And that's it?"

"That's it."

Damon crossed his ankles on the stand and smirked, "I'm gonna have to teach my brother that when you are on a date, you don't spend it talking about you're more dashing, hotter older brother."

"Your brother did just fine on the date," She said, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes playfully.

Damon stared up at her, not even bothering to care about watching the game, "Let me guess, hamburgers at the grill and a round of pool, he let you win, and then he took you over to Scoops for ice cream."

She kept her face forward, "You're wrong, we played darts."

"What's your favorite flavor?"

She turned to him, intrigued by his out of the blue question, "Vanilla," She said like she was inquiring where the conversation was going.

"You like to live on the edge, I see."

"Are you making fun of me?" She asked, her slender fingers skimming over the ribbon again, like she was thinking about undoing the bit of satin, as if it wasn't tight enough.

He quickly removed his feet from the metal stand and placed them firmly on the concrete and squared his shoulders, "I am because you're lying," he informed her, shaking his head, "Chocolate. Peanut-butter Crunch. Cookies 'n' Cream," he listed each flavor of ice cream dramatically, "If you would have said any of those I would have let you go on your lie, but saying vanilla is insulting my intelligence, hun," He said smugly.

"You just learned my name and you know what my favorite ice cream flavor is?"

"I do," He said, his upper lip curving into a slight smile, "And it ain't vanilla."

She didn't fool him with that cute ribbon in her hair, and prudish scoffs at his one-liners, and to prove his theory, he pulled out his silver flask from the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

She rolled her eyes back to the game, "You're bad news."

And for a split second, he had thought he might have misread the glint in her eyes and the curiously easy banter between them as her placating the estranged drunk of a brother of a boy she liked. But when he shook the flask enticing her to take it from him, she snatched it from his palm and unscrewed the cap and tilted the spout at her lips like a pro.

After several sips, she swiped her mouth with the back of her hand and offered his flask back to him.

"Happy?" She asked as he genuinely smiled at her.

He wanted to tell her he approved, and then he thought of his brother, and that maybe he was enjoying talking to the girl his brother had a date with a little bit too much.

"What did you do after ice cream? He said he was going to show you stuff around Mystic," He asked casually, anticipating her answer with everything but indifference. He wanted to know if it was early enough in her and his brother's courtship where he could make a move on Bonnie without breaking some brotherly code about coveting one's brother's girl. He reasoned if his brother hadn't taken her to look-out point to make out then she was still fair game.

"He took me to the park to talk on the swings and then home."

"Lame."

"Lame?" She said with a shrill, "Do tell me Damon, where you would have taken me that would have beat out the lovely evening I had with your brother?"

"Granted there isn't a lot of cool shit to do in Mystic, but I either would have taken you skinny-dipping at the quarry or ghost-hunting at Gilbert Place, something adventurous." He stated, thinking he had nailed it. 

"Gilbert Place? She asked with a seriousness that made Damon think she was already scared which made him salivate at telling her the lore of the plantation.

"Yeah, the story goes, that during the war, when the Union soldiers came to take control over Virginia, and when they got to the Gilbert plantation, the soldiers had found the entire household dead in their beds, even the babies in their cribs, and at first they thought it might had been the slaves that had cleared out or looters but the house was still neatly intact, and scared shitless, the soldiers started to make up stories about demons and ghosts and all kind of things to explain what they saw. They torched the mansion but the remaining brick foundation is there and there is a stupid Mystic Falls' tradition for seniors to camp out on the grounds and see who makes it alive the next the day, everyone does of course, kids just like to scare themselves."

She blinked at him and then finally said, "Do you get many second dates by taking girls to a massacre?

"I've never cared that much about second dates"

The game had ended while they had been chatting.

The Timberwolves had won.

She told him she had to get home.

"You're not gonna wait for the champ to exit the stadium?" He scoffed, looking at her hastily standing up and pulling her purse onto her shoulder.

"Can you tell him I came to see him and that I'll call him in the morning?" She asked him.

He said he would, although he was not thrilled about being a message boy to his brother.

She took a step down and looked back at him and asked, "What do you believe?"

"About what?" He asked, confused and still thinking of something to say to get her to stay a little longer.

"You said the soldiers thought it was ghosts or demons, or something. What do you believe?"

And for the first time that evening, he felt how cold the autumn air had turned, and he narrowed his eyes at her, and told her exactly what being had almost eradicated the Gilberts from Mystic Falls.

"It was a vampire."


End file.
